The critiques of rap artists and other participants in hip‐hop culture provide data for teachers and researchers to investigate the attitudes of US urban youth towards schooling This study explores the complex relationships between hip‐hop and science education by examining how rap lyrics project beliefs about schooling, the relevance of existing curriculum, and the intellectual capability of urban youth These lyrics also provide a synopsis of this population’s alienation from schooling and from science education in particular By examining student discourses in two US high schools, this study shows how co‐generative dialogues, and other classroom procedures derived from hip‐hop culture, may be used to modify teaching and learning in science and to ameliorate urban students’ alienation from schools

Affiliation and alienation: hip‐hop, rap, and urban science education

https://escholarship.org/content/qt8v3791f8/qt8v3791f8.pdf?t=pmg57z

Cosmopolitan preferences: The constitutive role of place in American elite taste for hip-hop music 1991–2005

The objective of this dissertation project is to
theorize and understand Black embodiment within the context of
white hegemony, that is, within the context of a white racist
anti-Black world. I theorize the Black body as a site of lived
historicity vis-a-vis whiteness as the transcendental signified or
as that which takes itself to be "unconditioned." I theorize how
the Black body, under the power of the white gaze, which is linked
to cultural, symbolic, and material power, undergoes what I refer
to as a "phenomenological return." Examples were taken from the
work of Ralph Ellsion, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B Du Bois, Frantz
Fanon, and others. It is here that the presumption of the
plasticity of the Black body, and the fact that it is a site of
contested meanings, speaks to the historicity of the Black body's
"being" as lived and meant within the interstices of social
semiotics. I interrogated the "Black body" as a "fixed and material
truth" that is said to pre-exist its relations with a white
normative world of anti-Blackness. On this score, I maintain that
not only does the Black body defy the ontic fixity projected upon
it through the white gaze, and, hence, through the episteme of
whiteness, but the white body is also fundamentally symbolic,
requiring demystification of its status as norm, the paragon of
beauty, order, innocence, purity, restraint, and nobility. The
insights of various critical whiteness studies theorists were
indispensable. I explore this larger racial Manichaean divide
through the use of blending autobiography, history, and
philosophical fiction. Through the Middle Passage and enslavement,
Black bodies became the site not only of white racist discursive
constructions, but the victim of white brutality and inhumanity
that literally left the Black body marked, scarred. Through an
exploration of Black resistance to the distorted Black imago of the
white imaginary, I theorize ways in which the Black body challenged
its conceptualization as "docile." White hegemony also
interpellated the white body as that which is epistemologically and
ontologically "given." In this way, it was necessary to render the
unseen of whiteness seen at the site of the quotidian, and explore
ways in which whites can disrupt whitely ways of
being-in-the-world.

https://dsc.duq.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2402&context=etd

Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body

Performing the erotic: (re)presenting the body in popular culture

This manuscript explores the charged and complex cultural histories bound up in the music and performative repertoire of English retro soul artist Amy Winehouse. It considers the aesthetics of Winehouse's vocal gestures and racial mimicry, and it explores the politics of what we might call sonic blue(s)face culture, a vocal phenomenon pioneered by black and white female entertainers in early twentieth century popular culture. The essay re-situates Amy Winehouse's work within this cultural legacy, and it explores the ways that her performance aesthetics invoke a diverse swatch of twentieth-century popular music genres, everything from the turn of the (last) century's black and white women's minstrel phenomenon to the late twentieth-century white female R&B vocalizing sensation and beyond. In sum, this essay aims to recuperate the vocal legacies of white and black women's musical collaborations and (dis)identifications so as to trace a through line that runs from early interracial aesthetic encounters all t...

“This voice which is not one”: Amy Winehouse sings the ballad of sonic blue(s)face culture

Guthrie Ramsey’s Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop is a fascinating account of the relationship between music and African American identity. Surveying an array of black music styles – blues, bebop, rhythm and blues, soul music, gospel music, and hip hop in films – Ramsey explores ways that African Americans have identified themselves in music. He draws upon his experience as a jazz and gospel pianist and his family’s participation in the Great Migration to generate an ethnographic method positioning family narrative at the intersection of racial identity and musical expression. He is also concerned with the ways in which African Americans have used music to construct positive and flexible concepts of “race.” As Ramsey argues early in the book: “My use of the term race music intentionally seeks to recapture some of the historical ethnocentric energy that circulated in these styles, even as they appealed to many listeners throughout America and abroad. […] I use the word race […] not to embrace a naive position of racial essentialism, but as an attempt to convey the worldviews of cultural actors from a specific historical moment.” (3, original italics) Ramsey’s explanation of “race music” or, rather, raced music, resonates in interesting ways with the concept of “race records” that emerged in the young American recording industry in the 1920s. The success of Mamie Smith’s 1920 recording of “Crazy Blues” prompted early record labels to initiate marketing campaigns targeting African Americans, Italian Americans, Jewish Americans, and others as distinct markets with specific musical tastes connected to their racial and ethnic identities. This trend substantiated a form of racial essentialism in sounds; record company executives assumed a homology between race and music consumption. In reality, however, American listening habits traversed racial and ethnic boundaries, creating a series of musical intercultures (see Slobin; Stanyek) evidenced in listening habits during the so-called “Jazz Age” and “Swing Era” of the 1920s and 30s. During this period, African American music became America’s popular music. While this intercultural listening challenged the marketing of “race records,” assumptions about racial identity and musical meaning continued to structure the way African American music was portrayed in American popular culture. Race Music strategically reclaims the notion of “race” from the inside out, from an emic or insider’s view of black music and its relationship to African American culture. Ramsey’s race music (re)presents the creative strategies African Americans employed in crafting their own identities in sound and how those sounds circulate as symbols in a variety of social contexts. Like the New Negro discourse of the Harlem Renaissance and the concept of Black Art during the 1960s and ‘70s, Ramsey’s race music is about self-determination, about reclaiming the ability to define oneself in sound. Ramsey develops three historical frameworks for locating the articulation of music and identity: Afro-modernism in the 1940s, black nationalism and soul music in the 1960s, and the “post-industrial moment” of the 1990s. These three historical frames illustrate important moments in which new understandings about the relationship between racial and musical identity were conceived in African American culture. One moment focuses on musical experimentalism and ideas about “modernity” in the 1940s that led to the creation of bebop. Ramsey also demonstrates how critical

Jason Robinson

Papers

Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop